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Two women on Marc Lépine’s death list speak out

Mass murderer Mark Lépine had a list of 19 women he wanted to kill. Two of them tell the Star about learning they were targets.

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The massacre of 14 women killed 25 years ago at the Ecole polytechnique because of their gender was commemorated in Montreal. Former Montreal police director Jacques Duschenau remembers the event as a 'real nightmare.'(Peter Ray, Marie-Espérance Cerda)

Marc Lépine killed 14 young women at the École Polytechnique in Montreal 25 years ago today, then shot himself. He left a suicide note with a list of 19 women.

It was his intended target list.

“(They) nearly died today,” wrote Lépine, 25. “The lack of time (because I started too late) has allowed these radical feminists to survive.”

How do you recover from being on a list like that? How do you live with it for 25 years?

The Star talked to two prominent Quebec women targeted by Lépine, Monique Simard and Francine Pelletier. They were already in shock over the murders at the University of Montreal’s engineering school. Then came the horror and survivor’s guilt of being on his list, which they learned about soon after the killings.

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Simard, president of Quebec’s film and culture foundation, SODEC, was a trail-blazing union leader in 1989. “My reaction was, Oh my God, these young women are the victims because he couldn’t get to us,” she says in an interview from her office in Old Montreal.

Monique Simard was among 19 women named in Marc Lepine's suicide note, in which he said he wanted to kill "these radical feminists." On the 25th anniversary of the Montreal Massacre she recalls how "horrifying" it was to be on that list.
(Peter Mccabe / THE TORONTO STAR)

“It was horrifying to be on that list.”

Pelletier, a prominent Quebec journalist — then and now — founded a feminist newspaper in the 1980s, La Vie en Rose. Two days after the killings, her editor at La Presse called her. “Have you see today’s paper,” asked Alain Dubuc. She hadn’t. “Brace yourself,” he told her.

That day, La Presse published the names of the 19 women, which had been leaked to a police reporter. “Your name is on it,” he said.

“It broke my heart,” says Pelletier. “It didn’t change who I was. But many of his victims probably weren’t even feminists (and) I felt they died in my name.

“For me, Polytechnique sounded the death knell of the glory days of feminism. Those days were gone when he started shooting. Feminism wouldn’t be easy anymore.”

Both women felt angry and betrayed.

“He was our first terrorist and nobody was treating it that way,” says Pelletier. “Those (engineering) students dared to take the place of men. They represented our future and he was targeting our future — how we imagined ourselves to be.”

Neither woman remembers being particularly afraid, even though Simard had to deal with death threats after her name was published and had bodyguards. A copycat killer phoned the Confederation of National Trade Unions, where she was a senior official, to say he would “come and finish the job” for Lépine. “Some people thought he was a hero.”

Police never made an arrest.

Lépine’s deadly rampage with a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle and a hunting knife caused so much damage to the women’s movement, it has taken nearly 25 years and scandals involving Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby to finally hit a nerve.

“This year is the first anniversary when there is really something to celebrate,” says Pelletier from her home in Montreal.

A victim is wheeled away from the University of Montreal after gunman Marc Lepine opened fire at the school in Montreal on Dec. 6, 1989. (SHANEY KOMULAINEN)

Arguably, in a sick way, Lépine understood women’s place in society in 1989 better than most commentators of his day: women were still essentially disregarded even though they were changing the old order and making inroads in professions that had been male preserves.

The list of 19 names was part of a three-page handwritten note he left behind. “Would you take note that if I commit suicide today, it’s not for economic reasons (but) for political reasons,” he wrote. “I have decided to send the feminists who have always ruined my life to their Maker.”

How much clearer could he get? A political crime.

Still, just as he predicted, he was labelled “the mad killer.” Headlines denouncing a hate crime against women, against feminists, were shockingly absent.

Lépine walked into the university’s engineering school at around 6 p.m. on a bleak December Wednesday and sent the male students out of a classroom. Shouting, “I hate feminists,” he opened fire, killing his first six victims. He killed 14 women and wounded 10 more, accidentally wounding four men.

A surviving student, Nathalie Provost, pleaded that she was not a feminist, but he shot her anyway.

Only Lépine’s target list of 19 women was released by La Presse in December 1989. If not for Pelletier and her outrage — her clear perspective — the whole letter might never have been made public a year later.

She learned of the letter’s existence early and set out to publish it. She wanted to know the “why” and not just the “who” of what was soon called the Montreal Massacre. She asked the police to release it and was denied. Then she tried to get it released under freedom-of-information legislation and was denied again.

Almost a year to the day after the murders, she received a photocopy of the note by mail. There were no markings. Years later, Jacques Duchesneau, who’d been Montreal police chief in 1989, told her he thought he knew who it was. That led her to believe the leaker was a police officer.

“Bullsh--,” she says of Lépine’s claim he allowed “these radical feminists” to survive. Most were prominent women, and included a Quebec cabinet minister as well as Pelletier and Simard. Some of the women were not well known, including the six police officers who apparently enraged him by playing on a volleyball league at work.

She gave the letter to La Presse and it was published in December 1990.

The rush to forget is evident in news coverage of the day. In a CBC TV report, Pelletier was a lone voice arguing it was “dangerous” not to recognize a political crime.

A female engineering student told the CBC in December 1990: “Marc Lépine, what he did doesn’t affect us.”

Pelletier calls the mass denial of the fact the crime was against feminists “the untold story of the whole thing.” She and Simard still shake their heads. Imagine, they say, if he’d separated blacks from whites, one ethnic group from another. He would still be considered mentally unbalanced, but it would have been seen as a hate crime, a racist crime.

It would have been so obvious. But women? Somehow they didn’t matter. Both women call it “deeply disturbing . . . depressing.”

They heap scorn on Lépine’s grievances against women. He couldn’t get into Polytechnique. The Canadian Armed Forces turned him down. He blamed feminists for everything. He saw a world in which women “retain the advantages of being women while trying to grab those of men.”

His father was an Algerian businessman who married a nurse from Quebec, and there were reports that examined the man’s misogyny and his brutality, including its effects on the boy who grew up Gamel Gharbi in Montreal.

Such reports are expected. But the silence about any political motive whatsoever stood out. Women talked about it, but it wasn’t part of the broader debate.

“There was such a sense of collective shame that this had happened in Quebec,” says Simard. “That happens elsewhere in the world. But here?

“You even heard that Quebec was a matriarchal society. C’mon!”

Pelletier remembers an editorial in Quebec City’s Le Soleil that argued “the truth was that the crime had nothing to do with women.” She says late Quebec actor and intellectual Pierre Bourgault was isolated in his argument that “this was the first sexist crime in history.”

Anger smoulders in her voice.

Pelletier describes the message as: “Cool it, girls . . . No one wanted to hear this stuff and, for me, that was such an aha moment.”

Simard feels the same way.

“I remember sitting in Notre-Dame Basilica (for the funerals of six of the murdered women) and feeling an overwhelming sense of rage inside me,” says Simard. SODEC’s offices overlook the church in Old Montreal.

Simard tried writing a letter to Lépine’s mother, Monique. She tried several times and ultimately couldn’t find the words.

“I felt so badly for her,” says Simard. Her only other child, Nadia, committed suicide with a drug overdose seven years after the Montreal Massacre.

”How could a mother live with the fact her own child kills women? There must have been so much pain.”

Monique Lépine wrote her memoir Aftermath in 2008 and still tours to speak about healing.

Simard says her husband, the late Quebec filmmaker Marcel Simard, was deeply pained by the contents of Lépine’s letter. “I remember comforting him. He took it so hard. He couldn’t believe that I was on that list . . . He died without getting over it.”

Simard’s son was 12 at the time of the massacre. She says she told him very little about Lépine’s suicide note.

It never occurred to her that she “could be in a dark place and it could have been the end for me.” She attributes her toughness to hard bargaining as a union activist.

The failure to acknowledge that the massacre was an act of terrorism against women dragged on. It even took 20 years for a movie portraying the raw horror of a man who stalked women like prey with his hunting rifle to get made. Denis Villeneuve’s Polytechnique opened in 2009.

Both Monique Simard and Francine Pelletier believe that 25 years later, things have truly changed.

“Young women today are extraordinary,” says Simard. “It’s not shameful to be a feminist.” She points to a recent feature in La Presse, “I am a feminist because . . . ”

“Women were scared to admit it for so long and it was so sad. It’s been a hard 25 years.” With that Simard pauses for a long time on the other end of the phone line, before repeating herself.

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